Modern animation and modeling systems enable artists to create high-quality content, but provide limited support for interactive applications. Although complex forms and motions can be constructed either by hand or with motion or geometry capture technologies, once they are created, they are difficult to modify, particularly at runtime.
The magic of computer graphics as seen in many current movies and computer games comes at a cost. Creating geometric forms that are used to generate synthetic characters, and animating the characters to bring them to life requires either highly skilled artists and/or sophisticated capture devices. Both are expensive and, in the case of highly skilled artists, rare.
At this time, a variety of 3D scanning methodologies are available that can capture shapes that exist in the real world. Motion capture technologies are also capable of recording complex performances. One drawback of these capture systems is the cost that is incurred in their purchase and operation. Another limitation of capture devices is that they are restricted to recording shapes and motions that can be observed and that actually exist (e.g., such systems cannot capture the motion of a dinosaur). In contrast to the scanning devices, highly skilled artists have the advantage of being able to model complex existing shapes, as well as imaginary shapes and animations.
Both of these means of creating shapes and animations are limited in the same way. In particular, neither has a simple means of automatically modifying the shapes and animations once they have been created. It would be highly desirable for current systems to be able to automatically modify a shape or animation for two reasons. First, in scripted settings, such as films, automatic modification makes it easier to avoid redundancy. For instance, an entire colony of different looking ants could be automatically created from a few distinct ants. In addition, the ants' motion could automatically adapt to changes in their mood or to the terrain they are walking on. Second, in non-scripted interactive runtime settings, such as games, it is not possible to anticipate all shapes and animations that will be needed when the game is played. Thus, most games simply try to reuse the closest fitting model or motion for the situation. One solution to the above problems is to create more shapes and animations. Unfortunately, this approach is very costly.
Accordingly, this invention arose out of concerns associated with improving modern animation and modeling systems.